Comic Talk: Cyberpunk 2077: Trauma Team 1 Review

The Review

Image courtesy of Dark Horse Comics

This book, by Cullen Bunn, Miguel Valderrama, Jason Wordie (not the letterer, which I feel is a missed opportunity), and Frank Cvetkovic follows a trauma team In the Cyberpunk 2077 setting – primarily one of the medics named Nadia. It opens with a psych eval on Nadia mostly in "voice over" during her last mission, but occasionally we see her in the evaluation room with all the screens, cables, and testing equipment you'd expect from the setting. You find out that Nadia is a little dead inside throughout the interview, or at least more jaded than when she started. She wanted to help people. Now it's just a job. You can feel how affected she is in the dialog between her and the evaluator. Surprise! The evaluator doesn't really care as long as she can do the job.

She’s being evaluated because the last job she was on went WAY south and she was the only one to make it out alive. She held out until the backup showed up and kept the client alive. Big win as far as the company is concerned. She is cleared to go back to work.

The new job requires her new crew to go into an apartment complex in gang territory to rescue the client and it turns into a firefight. Nadia has some painful flashbacks where she sees her old team getting killed off and freezes up briefly. Getting back on track, she and the other medic rush to the client while the soldiery-types on the team cover them. They reach him and…it's one of the primary people that killed her old crew! Dun-dun-duuuuuuuun!

Highly recommend it if you're interested in cyberpunk tales at all.

High Point(s)

• The pacing. This book feels like a movie in the best way. You can feel the camera moving and cutting from scene to scene most of the time.

Low Point(s)

• Sometimes it's a little hard to keep track of people since the trauma team has pretty much the same uniform and helmet covering all their features.

 

The Editing

This is the shortest editing section I think I’ll ever have. I’ve got nothing to say. The cover is sharp, the pacing is excellent, no lettering mistakes. Nothing. This is an amazing issue.

It feels wrong to find nothing, so let’s get really nitpicky. The artist's name overlaps with the helmet on the cover which is a little weird and it’s a little hard to tell what action is happening from the end of page seven through page eight. Not impossible, just less clear than it could be.